


Fight or Flight

by peregrinefalcon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, I don't fucking know how to tag this tbh, M/M, Mutual Pining, Quidditch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 05:29:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12006042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peregrinefalcon/pseuds/peregrinefalcon
Summary: The fight-or-flight response (also called hyperarousal, or the acute stress response) is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.----a birthday gift for flintxwood.tumblr.com





	Fight or Flight

i. Clenched Fists

> You see him first across the Quidditch field, conversing vigorously with his team. Their robes billow in the wind, the same colour as the grass on the field. Your captain is talking to your team as well, but you can’t hear him; your ears are roaring with the music of waves. It’s your first Quidditch game at Hogwarts, so why are you looking at the other team’s captain? You begin walking towards him but you do not know why. ‘… Shake hands,’ Madam Hooch says, and you shake hands with the keeper of the other team. You’re looking at him, but you’re not seeing his face. You walk down the line, shaking everyone’s hands, and lastly you stop at him. You stick your hand out, and you are glad that you are wearing gloves, for suddenly your hands have gone clammy. He doesn’t take it. You look at his hands, and they are clenched tightly in fists by his side. You look up to his face, and his jaw is set in stone, his eyes are hard as flint. ‘Don’t take it to heart,’ your captain tells you, ‘He’s always like this.’ You hadn’t noticed before, but your hands were clenched into fists.

ii. Throwing Punches

> It almost looks as though the goal hoops are on fire. You hate to admit it, but he’s good. He’s so good that it sets your skin ablaze with anger. Other players whip past you in shadows of red and green, but you’re not looking at them. ‘Pucey!’ you call and the other chaser passes the quaffle to you. The wind slashes at your face as you let yourself drop to avoid a bludger, and then twist forward towards the Gryffindor hoops. You can feel your speed pick up and your stomach lifts to your throat. You grip the quaffle in your hand, and throw - normally no chaser can make the shot, flying so fast and so close, but you are _Flint_ , there’s no shot you can’t make - and you would have made it, if the new kid didn’t jump off his  _broom_  to kick the quaffle away from his hoop, scraping your face with his boot in the process. You flit away as he tumbles through the air, grasping for his broom - he makes it in time, but there’s the unmistakable crack of a dislocated shoulder when he hangs by his broom. Pucey takes the quaffle. You’re staring at the Gryffindor keeper, who’s hauling himself  _back onto his broom_  despite Madam Pomfrey’s protests from the pitch. He catches you staring and throws you a look that is pure fire and challenge. You turn around and fly.

iii. Dodging Blows

> You don’t win the match on account of your dislocated shoulder. The captain wants to call you off, but the reserve keeper is out sick today. Besides, you don’t want to back down in front of  _him_. Madam Pomfrey sets your shoulder but it still hurts like nothing else. You can only defend two hoops at a time, and the Slytherins use this to their advantage. It takes two beaters to fight the bludgers off you, and the Slytherin chasers swarm you. You don’t care about the other boy, the one who plays like a textbook - Pucey, reads his uniform - but you do your worst against the Slytherin captain with stone eyes and black hair buzzed shorter than the Quidditch field grass. You just couldn’t let him score against you. The thought of losing to a person who doesn’t even respect you twists like a fist in your stomach. You think you do reasonably well for someone who’s dislocated their shoulder and Slytherin catches the snitch, but somehow it doesn’t feel like losing. Flint didn’t score a single goal against you. After the match, he walks over to you, and extends his hand. ‘Flint,’ he introduces himself, as if you couldn’t read the name on his robes. You don’t take it. ‘Wood,’ you reply. He smiles at you, all teeth and antagonism. It feels dangerous.

iv. Falling

> When you’re not flying circles around one another on the pitch, you rarely interact with Wood. He sticks to his pack of Gryffindor dogs, and you don’t stray from your nest of snakes. Until one day you hear him debating loudly in the ground floor corridor on the techniques of historic Quidditch chasers. ‘No, you’re wrong! It’s got to be Joscelind Wadcock,’ you hear Wood say, ‘She’s scored the most goals in this century.’ You don’t recognise the other voice. ‘You’re too narrow-minded, Wood. you only think of Great Britain. Luxembourg’s Bigonville Bombers score the most in the world.’ You round the corner of the corridor and see that it’s Viktor Krum talking to Wood. Of course Krum would talk to all the Hogwarts captains while he was here. Though, he hasn’t talked to you yet, and that doesn’t quite sit well with you. You’re the best chaser in the school. Especially when it considers Wood, your arch-nemesis. Speak of the Devil, somehow he notices you in the crowd of black robes, and calls out your name, ‘Flint!’ It cuts through the hum of the hallway, clear and sharp. You look at him, and he suddenly seems at odds with that black uniform, his tan skin and sun-lightened, wind-tousled brown hair suggesting that he should be somewhere else. You try to hold his gaze, but he turns back to Krum and says, ‘That’s Flint, the Slytherin captain and chaser. have you managed to talk to him yet? I can hardly get anything out of him, except a “sod off” on two memorable occasions.’ Krum nods at you and you nod back, and turn away. Somehow you’re less disgruntled at Wood talking to Krum, but more distressed at Krum talking to Wood. It feels wrong but you’re afraid of answering why. But you know that  _you_ should be talking to Wood. You don’t care that Krum is an international Quidditch star,  _you’re_  the only one who can beat Wood. _You’re_  the only one who knows all his tricks and feints, all his moves and habits  ~~and he knows all of yours~~. _You’re_  the only one who can score against him.  _You’re_  the only one who can match him on the field. _You’re_  the only one he should  _care_  about. So when he comes out of potions later that day, you grab him by the collar and say, ‘We all know Fabian Watkins was the best fucking chaser in the world, prat.’

v. Impact Upon Landing

> For some reason Flint has taken to talking to you more, if you can call it that. Mostly, you argue. You argue about Quidditch, because unsurprisingly you disagree on nearly everything. You  _know_  that Puddlemere United is the most consistently brilliant team, but he argues that the Falmouth Falcons and the Montrose Magpies are ‘the most innovative.’ ‘Wood, can’t you understand,’ he says, ‘They are the true game-changers! It’s revolutionary.’ ‘Flint, what you call “innovation,” I call “cheating”,’ you tell him, and he just sort of smirks in a way that pisses you off. You wonder if everything he does is to piss you off, like the way he always has that lopsided sneer when he talks to you, or the way his stone eyes spark when he talks about Quidditch, or the way he picks at the split branches in his broom as if he were some nitpicky professional  ~~not yet, you remind yourself~~ , or the way he rubs the shaved back of his head when you win an argument, or the way his fingers linger treacherously close to yours when he leans back to talk about the relative velocities of various brands of quaffles in the air, and how if Hogwarts had invested money in a new Zephyr pennifold quaffle, he would totally mow the Quidditch pitch with your arse  ~~he wouldn’t~~. Or the way he’s always wrong at Quidditch, of course. None of his conclusions make sense to you  ~~or you just don’t want to admit that it does~~  and you can’t help but think there’s a better use for that mouth instead of blathering out blatant untruths about the Quidditch industry  ~~but you shouldn’t be thinking that~~. Every time you talk to him it feels like you’re stomach’s been hit by a bludger; every time you see him it feels like a snitch is buzzing around in your skull; every time he smirks at you it feels like a quaffle has gone through your hoop. It’s madness, but even if this is a game you’re meant to lose, you’re gonna play it anyway.

vi. To Learn to Fly Again

> Gryffindor wins against Slytherin. He’s beaming like the sun, his teammates throwing themselves at him, cheering and slapping his back. He has Harry Potter in a headlock, and is tousling Potter’s shaggy black hair vigorously in pride. He has a smudge of mud on his cheek, and you want to wipe it off of him. He catches you looking at him, and he stops smiling. You don’t want to know why. You turn back to your team, all sullen and sour after a loss, as usual, and you tell them next time to move faster, take risks, and hit harder. You clip Malfoy on the back of his head for spending too much time bantering with Potter. ‘More game, less talk,’ you tell him. You dismiss your team, but you don’t go with them. Instead, you lie in the field, spread-eagle, and look at the sky. You look at Wood, upside-down. ‘When did you get here?’ you asked him as his face loomed above yours. From the corner of your eyes you see his knees beside your head. ‘Didn’t find you in the changing room.’ You didn’t ask why he was looking for you in the changing room. ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks. ‘How I lost my only chance at wrenching the Quidditch Cup from your hands.’ He laughs, and it sounds like wind blowing in your ears. You close your eyes, and it’s gone, wind blowing in your ears. ‘Flint,’ he says your name, and you’re no longer stone, you’re all dirt and silver. ‘It’s Marcus,’ you say to no one in particular, and then he kisses you. You think, this must be how it’s like to fly at the speed of sound. This must be how it’s like to outstrip a Firebolt on the field. This must be how it’s like to fly like a golden eagle, like a peregrine falcon, like a swift. This must be how it’s like to fly faster than falling. You can barely feel yourself anymore; you’re all fire and wind, slipping through his hands. ‘Wood’, you say, and he laughs. ‘It’s Oliver.’

vii. Wind in Your Wings

> You feel as if you’ve been hit by lightning. You’re floating as you walk, you’re unfocused as you think, but every time he’s in the room electricity fills the air, and you feel like you can breathe again, see again. Is this what it feels like to grasp the wind? Is this what it feels like to ride a storm? When he smiles at you - smiles, not smirks - it hurts worse than a boot to the face. It hurts because you feel so much, because you want so much, because you have it all. It hurts so much because you’re so happy, and you aren’t big enough to contain it all. Every time he brushes your shoulder in the hallway, or puts a hand on your shoulder, you’re filled with the stabbing need to push him against the nearest wall and snog him senseless. Or let him snog you senseless. Whoever wins. He makes you feel like you’ve flown so high, and you never want to come back down again. Is this what it feels like to own the wind beneath your wings? You’re still the same old, arguing about Quidditch, living and breathing Quidditch, but at the same time it’s changed. It’s more relaxed, like there’s nothing that needs to be proved anymore. He’s no longer that concerned about winning against you in every single argument. He admits, that Puddlemere has  _some_  decent players; ‘The Falcons still cheat,’ you refuse to concede. ‘You’ve got poor taste,’ he mutters. You grin, ‘Yeah, and you’ve got  _great_  taste, since you’re currently dating Puddlemere’s new reserve keeper.’ He flashes you that old smirk again. ‘Good, that means we’ll still be nemeses on the playing field.’ Some things just never change.

viii. Icarus

> The sun falls against his skin through the slats of the blinds, and for a moment it feels like he’s barely there, and you can only see slivers of his existence. Like a moth is drawn by the flame, you’re tempted to reach out and touch, just to see if the other parts exist beyond the shadow. You do reach out, and you touch him, and he’s yours. ‘Marcus?’ You hear your name on his tongue and it sounds like something wondrous and alien, and not something as commonplace as the name you’ve lived with for twenty-odd years. He twists in your bed, overturning your hand, and stretches. ‘Goddammit, why are you always up so early?’ he gripes as he spells the blinds up. The sunlight is so bright that you can see every strand of brown hair on his head, and for a moment his brown eyes look green. ‘You know I wake with the sun,’ you never take your eyes off of him. ‘Then don’t wake me up with you!’ he punches you in the shoulder and laughs, and you realise that you never want to hear another sound in your life again. You reach behind into the drawer of your bedside table, and you grope for that sun-gold ring. You feel as if you’ve swallowed a snitch. 'Oliver-’ and his name sounds like falling on your tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, constructive criticism is encouraged and appreciated!
> 
> Come say hi to me on tumblr: durmstranqs.tumblr.com


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